Re: Telephone switch capacity -Reply
At 18:43 11/3/95, Rich Graves wrote:
[about the FBI supposedly wanting the ability to tap 1% of all phones in the US simultaneously]
[...]
Of course the FBI doesn't have the staff to listen to all these lines, and they need an individual court order to authorize each individual interception, so this numbers game is a bit of a joke.
One more time. Despite what you read in the papers, despite what most people - even in the legal profession - believe, telephone wiretaps do _not_ require a court order. They haven't required a court order in over a year. The Digital Telephony Bill, which passed Congress by an overwhelming margin, _explicitly_ allows for wiretap authorizations other than a court order. The law does not impose any rules for these "other forms of authorization". "The captain signed it off" may suffice. -- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred.
On Sat, 4 Nov 1995, Lucky Green wrote:
At 18:43 11/3/95, Rich Graves wrote:
[about the FBI supposedly wanting the ability to tap 1% of all phones in the US simultaneously]
[...]
Of course the FBI doesn't have the staff to listen to all these lines, and they need an individual court order to authorize each individual interception, so this numbers game is a bit of a joke.
One more time. Despite what you read in the papers, despite what most people - even in the legal profession - believe, telephone wiretaps do _not_ require a court order. They haven't required a court order in over a year. The Digital Telephony Bill, which passed Congress by an overwhelming margin, _explicitly_ allows for wiretap authorizations other than a court order. The law does not impose any rules for these "other forms of authorization".
"The captain signed it off" may suffice.
And Clinton issued an executive order allowing Janet Reno (or her designees, I believe) to approve wiretaps. bd
-- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred.
Lucky Green writes:
One more time. Despite what you read in the papers, despite what most people - even in the legal profession - believe, telephone wiretaps do _not_ require a court order. They haven't required a court order in over a year.
They never required a conventional court order. This was not new. They always had a national security escape clause. However, at least they cannot be used in court unless there was a court order involved, and the process of getting "legitimate" authorization to, say, bug the embassy phones, does require that certain forms be followed. The real problem, IMHO, is that people can avoid the formalities entirely and simply unlawfully wiretap, and that tracing such attempts is hard. Perry
participants (3)
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Brad Dolan -
Perry E. Metzger -
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